The Morning the Sacred Steam Cooled
The kitchen of the onsen inn always smells of hot water. It has seeped into the walls, soaked into the cloth, crept between my fingers. Three years I’ve worked here, and I still can’t tell my own smell apart from the water’s. A single window, set high in the wall, lets in a morning light that looks wet with steam.
I’m an apprentice cook at this inn. Hardly anyone calls me by name. “Hey.” “You.” “That yudōfu prep done yet?”—you can tell how far along the day is just by how they call out. That’s fine with me. A knife in my hand feels more like me than any name tag.
The inn is enjoying a strange prosperity now.
Three years ago, a young idol still on her way up stayed a single night for a magazine shoot. That alone is now the pillar this inn stands on. Her room is called “the sacred site,” booked solid a year in advance. The private open-air bath where she supposedly soaked costs five times the usual rate—for the bath fee alone. Guests drape support-color towels over their shoulders and photograph from the bath’s edge without ever entering the water. The hassun I plate goes untouched, cooling one bite at a time.
Maybe consumption means not eating. That’s what I think.
On my days off, I read the employment statistics on my phone. I’ve made something of a habit of it. Tourism’s job-openings ratio runs high. The numbers announce a labor shortage, a cry for young hands. Yet real wages have barely moved in three years. Numbers don’t lie. That’s exactly why they don’t tell the truth either. They say this inn’s sales are the highest in its history. Then why doesn’t my pay move? The answer is written nowhere. All that’s written is the fact that consumption is expanding, fervor circulating, a photo saved millions of times.
Fervor may flow through the inn, pass through the inn, but it never settles on us.
“The fans’ love gathers in this inn like warm water,” the proprietress explains, beaming. Love doesn’t circulate like water. Water cools and wells up again; love moves one way, siphoned off toward the agency and the rights holders. I don’t answer. In the kitchen, not answering is the most courteous response there is.
Last month, a middle-aged woman staying alone at the sacred site said this at dinner: “When that girl retires someday, my whole life’s schedule goes blank.” She was eating her chestnut rice with relish. An ordinary guest, and the most talkative person in the inn. I found myself wondering: is she a fan of the idol, or of herself being a fan? I wondered, then stopped. It’s not a cook’s place to wonder.
What truly concerns me is the water.
Two weeks ago, late at night, the old head clerk took me aside: “The source temperature is down two degrees from last year. Output’s probably dropped by a third. Don’t tell anyone. Not the proprietress, not the guests.” I nodded. The kitchen leaves no option but to nod.
A system is a mechanism that stays unbroken for as long as it keeps turning. This inn keeps turning. Reservations fill, the sacred site remains sacred, and my knife is sharpened at five each morning. As long as it turns, the fact that something deep in the water is growing thin appears in no one’s ledger.
Still, when night deepens, only the beauty remains.
Finishing prep and stepping out the back door, I find river mist swallowing the hot-spring town. The town’s lights dissolve into the steam and drift faintly upward. Here and there, vapor rises from the open-air baths through the rooftops, raising slender white pillars into the depths of the night. This is how it will come, I think. The end of the world. Without sound, without telling anyone, like steam.
When I was young, I wanted to make people happy through cooking. I still do. But my work now is closer to waiting on the rituals of consumption. Is the world wrong, or is it me, for noticing the world’s wrongness? The knife tells me honestly where the grain of an ingredient runs. The world’s grain shows no core no matter where you cut. How do you cut something that offers no edge for a blade?
Next weekend, the idol herself comes to this inn for a shoot, her first visit in three years. The proprietress has ordered the private open-air bath filled to the brim, and a kaiseki feast to mark the occasion. The sacred site is polished as a sacred site should be, the water drawn to maximum, support-colored furoshiki cloths strung along the corridors. All of it for a two-night dream.
The night before, the head clerk was peering at the bathhouse gauge, face pale. The open-air bath, which should have been full, had dropped three fingers’ worth. No one had opened a drain. In the night, the source had held its breath.
Wiping my freshly honed knife, I gazed at the morning mist through the small window. It was a beautiful morning. If I say nothing, the pilgrimage continues. If I speak, someone’s dream is cut short. For three years I’ve been a watcher, staring at the world’s fraying seam from a corner of the kitchen. Does a watcher have the right to turn a blade on it? Or is my answer simply to watch this water cool and call it beautiful?
Beyond the morning mist, the water of the sacred site quietly, quietly counts its own depths.